Topic 4 - Leadership Development and Distributed Organizing

The following table details some of the key questions you can reflect on when assessing the robustness of your volunteer programs and teams. If you are looking to scale up your volunteer activities to enable capacity to deepen engagement with larger numbers of engaged volunteers, again this table will offer you some reflection on what tools, supports and systems may need to be designed to be able to best support this.  

 Remember, whether a volunteer run or staff supported organization, volunteers need support. This tool reflects on this and identifies opportunities for you to advance and strengthen these programs. 
Question
Your Answer
Opportunities for improvement
How many active volunteer groups/teams do you have?
  
What is the primary basis of these groups/teams (geographic, issue or program, function)?
  
How do you recruit for these teams/groups?
  
What is the average number of people in each group/team?
  
Do you have clearly defined roles within each group/team?
  
 
Are there specific Job Descriptions for these roles? (how are they kept, shared, amended)
  
What is the potential for leadership development within groups? How is this potential tracked, supported, incented?
  
Are there specific tests for leadership potential? If so, what are they and how might they trigger a promotion for a volunteer?
  
Are there one-to-one meetings between key volunteers and staff?
  
 
Are there specific Job Descriptions for these roles? (how are they kept, shared, amended)
  
What is the potential for leadership development within groups? How is this potential tracked, supported, incented?
  
Are there specific tests for leadership potential? If so, what are they and how might they trigger a promotion for a volunteer?
  
Are there one-to-one meetings between key volunteers and staff?
 
Do you have a volunteer/leadership
recognition program?		                                                                                               


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Topic 1: Theory of Change

Defining your organization, groups or programs engagement-based Theory of Change helps you (and your team members) understand why engagement is important to your work and specifically, how strengthening your people power will achieve those outcomes.   By identifying your "If....then....because" statement you can put this rationale into a succinct and clear phrase that keeps focus on the purpose, and outcomes you are driving for in all your engagement activities.   IF WE  _____________________________________________________________________________________, THEN WE WILL ACHIEVE _____________________________________________________________________, BECAUSE __________________________________________________________________________________.
Read more

Topic 2: Recruitment and Listbuilding

In this topic, we explored deepening the understanding of who your priority people are for your engagement activities. This can often be answered by asking the question: who do we most need to engage to help us realize the change we wish to see? Once you know the answer to this question (and NO, the answer is not "everyone") then you can tailor recruitment strategies to reach these people. 1. Who are your people? 2. Where do you find your people? 3. What recruitment strategies would best identify and reach these people?
Read more